Posted 8:09 AM

New tricks and old tools

Kim Cameron follows up on Clayton Donley's post with some thoughts of his own. And ends by quoting Clayton:

"The real solution here is a combination of virtualization with more standardized publish/subscribe for delivery of changes. This gets us away from this ad-hoc change discovery that makes meta-directories miserable, while ensuring that the data gets where it needs to go for transactions within an application."

and adding: " As soon as applications understand they are PART OF a wider distributed fabric, they could propagate changes using a publication pattern that retains the closed-loop verification of self-converging metadirectory. "

I couldn't agree more with these two erudite gentlemen.

Unfortunately, today's applications, and especially yesterday's applications still hanging around on our networks, but even tomorrow's applications for some time to come won't be written to be a part of a "wider distribution fabric," especially as that fabric doesn't yet exist in any meaningful way. And, as Kim said in an earlier posting, "Here’s the problem. Infrastructure people cannot dictate how application developers should build their applications. " We can build the infrastructure that will excel in a publish-subscribe world, but getting the apps developers to buy in to that model, well, that's something else. I'm all for building the infrastructure and plumbing of the future, but we need to adapt today's tools so that we can get the job done while waiting for the new plumbing.

Labels: Identity Bus, Identity Hub, metadirectory, virtual directory